Plasma displays are driven by column drivers and line drivers. Line drivers are used in selecting the line to be addressed, and the column drivers are used to write video data on the panel. The column drivers are mostly referred as data drivers. The load of the data drivers is essentially a capacitive load, which means that power dissipation and energy consumption on the data drivers will be basically determined by the amount of data transitions occurred in the process of data writing. A typical picture to be displayed on a plasma panel will cause a typical load on the data drivers. However, less than one percent of the pictures may cause a very high number of transitions at the output of the data drivers, causing driver overheating. A possibility to avoid overheating is to add large cooling metal plates or even fans. Those cooling methods require a lot of temperature sensors or are not reliable. Therefore, such cooling methods seem to be wasteful in terms of resources, when taken into consideration that overheating typically occurs only for less than one percent of the pictures. Therefore it already has been recommended to evaluate the output data of the drivers concerning the number of data transitions to estimate the temperature of each data driver. As countermeasures to avoid overheating it already has been recommended to reduce the number of subfields or to reduce the panel gain. Unfortunately, said means to avoid overheating severely degrade the picture quality, in a visible way. A reduced panel gain leads to darker picture and less picture brightness arbitrates the impression that the panel works not properly. A reduced number of subfields causes and increases the number of quantization errors in a not acceptable way and is not effective for all pictures as e.g. if overheating is caused by the most significant subfields, cutting off least significant subfields will be of limited use. Furthermore, plasma displays generate pictures of high contrast with a real black level compared to the lighter grey of the unilluminated parts of an LCD screen, however, are often criticized for power consumption as power consumption varies greatly with picture content, with bright scenes drawing significantly more power than darker ones. Therefore, also an energy recovery driver circuit for the AC plasma display panel having an enhanced energy recovery efficiency with a short voltage rise and fall period has been recommended.